The Doctor
by HumanyWumany
Summary: What happens when your life is Nothing and then a man falls out of the sky and becomes your Everything? What happens after that? The thought processes and feelings  of the Doctor's travelling companion.


Life crawls past in every shade of grey; you've finally accepted that this is all you can do, that there is no more than this. Nothing but a blur of work and friends and family and your swaddling disappointment at your own powerlessness and insignificance. Maybe crazy things just happen. Maybe they don't. Maybe there's a reason. Maybe there isn't. Maybe you're just obsessed with a notion of Something to fill up the Nothing that is your life. A Nothing full of Maybes. Maybe- stop it. Definitely there are no aliens. This is all there is. Then one day you prove the world wrong. There's an attack; fire pours from the sky, bringing another people who want this messed up world for their own. Take it, you say, just show me what your life is. People scream and people die. You realise there's no such thing as coming in peace; these creatures come in war, a war that will consume the whole world and all its inhabitants before you turn twenty one and you begin to wish that the aliens would go away and leave you and your every-shade-of-grey life alone. You weren't happy but you were almost content. You're close to your death when he saves you, walking from Nowhere into Everywhere, from Nothing into Everything. He sends the aliens home, not with weapons but with words, with stories. Words are his weapons and he uses them well, manipulating them until they tell the story of every sadness in his old, old eyes; he makes the aliens ashamed and they go away. The young old man wants no acknowledgement of his heroism. He walks towards a battered blue box made of wood that looks even older that he does but you know really that nothing in the Universe will ever be older than the travelling man because he has felt the pain of a million dying worlds, he has cried the tears of a million grieving parents and he has stood powerless at the end of a million planets and yet you know there will never be anyone younger than the travelling man because he finds laughter in listlessness, love in loathing and life in loss. Just to look at him you know he is the wisest and most stupid man who ever has and ever will live. His loneliness is a physical presence looming over him as he opens the box's door. You stop him and you ask him if you can travel with him. He says yes. You asked the question but you know that he chose you, not the other way around. He stinks of love and hatred, good and evil, paradise and disaster. You don't know which side you prefer, you don't know which side is real, you don't care. He holds your hand and your life begins. His box is bigger than it looks, you realise, it's a shock at first but you soon get used to it, like everything he shows you. Your world is not restricted to one planet, one country, one town; it is as big as everything and it shines with a blinding iridescence and for years you smile as you run with your funny sad old young loving hating doctor. Together the two of you save worlds and write history; together you judge, together you condemn without prejudice and watch whole civilisations burn but you can't help sometimes and you just have to accept that. You face situations so happy you weep and so sad you scream but you always have each other; you think you are special and you breathe him like oxygen. There was Nothing before him and there will be Nothing after. Without him you would die but he is a doctor and he has fixed you; his job is done. You knew really that it had to end someday, didn't you? You realised you couldn't possibly live a great big Something full of certainties forever? One day something happens; maybe you die, maybe you know you can't do this anymore, maybe he knows you can't, maybe you fight, maybe you- enough with the maybes. You find yourself left on your own tiny planet utterly alone. He tells you he'll come back but you don't know if it's true. There's one certain Something in your new old Maybe Nothing. You will wait for him until the sun burns out, until it consumes the earth with its spiralling unfeeling flames and the earth is nothing but a charred carcass of what it once was; you shouldn't be alive then, but you would be because that is how strong your obsession with the notion of him is. Your life is grey again but you see the beauty in its simplicity. You have seen so much, you have had your time of adventure. You should be happy that you ever had the chance to do what you have done and you are, to a certain extent but the longing for him almost consumes you, the ache of it. You know you will never be whole, can never be fixed, put back together again in anything resembling your original pattern but that doesn't matter. It's a small price to pay for the whole universe and the doctor. You wouldn't have missed him for the entire world. There's better planets out there anyway.


End file.
